to damn good!

I call it my golden syrup puddings - I think!

basically a couple of nights ago I made this microwaveable chocolate cake thingy which tasted OK while it was hot but not the nicest when it was cold. when I was making the mixture it looked allot like a chocolate self sauce pudding mixture because obviously it would need allot of moisture to enable it to go in the microwave without becoming too dry so it got me thinking and the next day, I was cooking again. I sort of used it as a base sort of sitting in the back of my mind but also made it up as I went!

it had . . .

• 1cup SR flour
• 1/2cup castor sagar
• 1/2cup brown sugar
• 1/2tsp baking soda
• 2 eggs
• 1/2cup milk
• 1tbs vanilla essence
• 6-8tbs golden syrup
• 100g butter
• I think that was it . . . . . . . . although I did only do half a batch . . .

all you do is mix the dry and wet ingredients and then mix then together. easy!

then for the "self sauce" part I sprinkled about 1-2tbs brown sugar over the cake and melted about 1-2tbs golden syrup into 1/2cup of hot water. I then slowly poured it over and put it into the oven until golden brown. Ok so it did look a bit caved in when it came out - I think I got it out to soon but it looks perfect for a row of lightly whipped cream! any way, it tasted good . . . I would really like to try it in small individual serving things as I think that would look really cute . . . you know the type?? 

anyway, I'm off to eat the last piece! 

mrs feilds cookies

they are the best!
so good, I am keen to re-create them - hopefully

there soft, they bend, they melt in your mouth

im thinking lots of butter, suggar and eggs, minimum flour and lots of love

the chocolate is sooo soft - nothing like the melts that you buy from the shop so I'm thinking of melting chocolate with a dash of cream and maybe even a splodge of butter . . . hmm?? 

there are a few recipes on the Internet claiming to be "Mrs fields" cookies but i don't know . . . some of them have oats in them which to me don't scream "Mrs fields" recipes, Id much perfer to just have a go from scratch! I have read a few pages on this website
http://www.dianasdesserts.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/bakingtips.Brownies/Brownies.cfm
so I have done my research and I am ready to cook (ok, so if i wanted to I suppose I could do a lot more research but I'm to keen to keen to wait!

wish me luck :)

quick thoughts of butterscotch

ahh, deserts . . .
this may seem very odd but we dont really have deserts in this household (just amazing sweets when I feel like cooking) but today I though that i would make an actual desert at actual desert time :P

so I had seen this thing in a womens weekly cook book at student works (another thing to blog about) and Im not going to go into detail - purely because i cant be bothered :P but it was with puff pastry, cream and berries (I think) and a few days ago we brought this butterscotch icecream - I wanted hazelnut but they didnt have any :( - and so I decided to create this thing from the book . . . ok, so its nothing like it but they both have puff pastry!

to intencify the butterscotch flavour and make it not so boring I decided to attempt at making a a butterscotch sauce so I looked up a few recipes and whiped together a suprizingly yummy one!

the "base" recipe that I used was from this website:

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/12431/butterscotch+sauce

but as usual I couldnt just use that recipe, I had to adjust it somehow!

I only had whipped cream in the fridge (there was probably between 1/2 and 2/3c of it) so in that went followed by some brown sugar (visually a bit more than the cream) I then put about 1 1/2 tbs of butter and heated it up. I then decided to put some golden syrup (about 1tbs) and because the cream was chantilly, I didnt bother with any vanilla essance.

the pastry took forever to cook but I soon had a finished desert and I must say it tasted pretty damn good!

the butterscotch sauce however had colled down and seperated by the time the pastery was cooked and it looked really weird, it was sort of coated in butter, but I heated it up again and it came back together; I think I will have to have a bit of a play with the proportions of things!

so much for "quick thoughts" but anyway! Im off to qld on tuesday :D hopefully to do some shopping, cooking, and chinese food eating! . . . there are these two amazing chinese shops up there, one near the vally, i think its like a little china town street?? I have only been there once but it was very memorable and they had the BEST fried rice and the other is near southbank and they have an AMAZINGLY good satay chicken - also the best of its kind! ohh, and theres also this awesome pancake place at southbank and they have those dutch pancake things, you know the ones, the small puffy things YUM!!! I usually get them at festivale but i didnt go there this year and then I also could have had them at agfest but I decided not to so watch out dad . . . I will be after my pancake and chinese fix! I swear I dont have chinese anywhere else now . . . nothing is as good as it is in qld! thai on the other hand . . . :D

not so teriblesu!

ahh, the joy of not creating a flop! although It still needs some improvement . . . I am very pleased with my caramasu :) (noo . . . I don't like making up words or anything ;)  ;)

so I did end up making the tiramisu inspired caramel cake type thing and although Its texture was more like a trifle but I am hoping to work on that next time.

the cake its self was really soft and I think that with the next one I make I would like to try cutting the sponge a bit thicker as you couldn't really tell what it was - well you could but not really?? 
another thing I would like to try is to make my own caramel hot chocolate concoction as I would really like to make it again but I don't want to use all of my caramel hot chocolate mixes (that I am enjoying right now!)

the mascarpone filling tasted amazing! I ended up using the one on the back of the mascapone packaging and tweaking it a bit by adding some pre-whipped Chantilly cream - yum! It was really sweet and complimented the caramel flavour very nicely.

so basically there were three parts to my caramel concoction . . .

the caramel hot chocolate mixture (which almost didn't make it to the cake!) 

the sweetly deliciously tasting mascapone cheese filling - there wasn't enough of this either! :D 

the fluffy and delicate sponge cake . . .

almost as good (if not just as good) as the one I made at student works if I do say so myself :)

oh and there was also the occasional slither of chocolate in between the layers

along with some yummy, crunchy, flakey sponge cake flakes sprinkled on top!

and after layer apon layer . . .

THIS started to take form . . .

A yummy, caramely, creamy, sweetly thing!

Yum!

I will post a photo of it cut along with a little slogan thingy that I wrote for my (hopefully) book!
my mouth I watering now . . . yum!